Jimmie Fadden

The following interview originally appeared in the National Harmonica League magazine as part of my regular column, Reeds for the Record...​There are few who have had as large an influence on modern harp players as Jimmie Fadden. Jimmy is a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which spans five decades, thirty some odd albums, for which the band has won 3 Grammies. His harp mentor and teacher was Sonny Terry and his early “harp buddies” included Alan Wilson and Taj Mahal. Early on, he had the opportunity to play with legends such as Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Manse Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, JB Hutto and the Hawks, Harmonica George Smith, Muddy Waters, Merle Travis and Earl Scruggs. He’s recorded with Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Dan Fogelberg, John Denver, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Hornsby, and Johnny Cash. Jimmie continues to perform with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as well as the trio, Suitcase Full of Blues.

RG: How did you get started playing music and the harp?

JF: I’m not actually sure how I got my first harmonica, but I believe I was about 16 or 17; somewhere around 1964 or ‘65. I was hanging out at McCabe’s guitar shop in Long Beach, California and very interested in music. I had played a little bit of mandolin and autoharp and I’m not sure how I got into the harmonica except that it was very evocative and said a lot beyond what it actually played; the intention of the musician was audible in a very easy to understand way.

RG: Would you say you were “serious” about music at that time?

JF: I was serious about girls at that time! I’ll say that because it’s funny, but the truth of the matter is that I believe all young guys who start playing music want to meet girls! At some point during highschool I suffered a series of depressions. I don’t know what brought them on, and music was a great outlet for me. It was a way to physically relieve myself of how I felt. It became a great pathway to emotional comfort and freedom from the things I was feeling, and it didn’t really seem to matter which instrument I chose to play.There were a couple of guys my age I had met who played music; one played guitar and one played mandolin, the Agajanian brothers. Both of those guys showed a path to me and I started pursuing that. Music sort of came to me naturally and I didn’t think of it as a profession but just as a way to enjoy life and feel better about myself.

RG: What instrument do you consider your “main” instrument?

JF: I’m not as much a multi-instrumentalist now as I was; I’ve sort of let my guitar playing go by the wayside. I’m pretty much a drummer that plays harmonica or a harmonica player that plays drums, either way you want to look at it. We had three guys who played drums and I think the other two needed to be up front more than I did, so I got the lion’s share of the drum chair. I’m not a real technical player, but I really enjoy playing a groove and keeping time for myself when I’m playing harmonica, which I do simultaneously. Tris Imboden, of the band Chicago, also plays both at the same time and we gas each other about doing both things. In our band we didn’t need harmonica on every song and it was nice to have the opportunity to do something else. Our group has always had a history of swapping instruments. It was more a matter of arrangement opportunities and that’s kind of how it happened!

RG: Any notable early influences?

JF: Well, one of my first influences was Charlie McCoy because I had heard him playing on one of my dad’s Chet Atkins records. He is one of the greats. And on the other hand, I heard that moody thing that Bob Dylan was doing. These were two very different playing techniques; one was about playing melodically or lyrically and the other was more about playing expressively with chords and filling the space between the voice and guitar. In between those two, I later found examples that I liked learned something from all of them. The first experience in that respect was Sonny Terry who allowed me to spend quite a bit of time with him. Sonny and Brownie used to play on the West Coast and we played a lot of the same clubs. So I got to hang out with him. He was really my first teacher; someone who actually showed me how to play things that he was playing. He was very generous with me! So somewhere between Sonny Terry, Charlie McCoy, Bob Dylan, and Paul Butterfield, who was another guy who played in our area that I got to hang out with; a pretty diverse group!

We had a fantastic folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove and a lot of incredible artists came through there. I got chance to hang out and sit in with quite a few of them. I’m a lucky guy! I also learned a lot from playing with people who didn’t play harmonica like Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin Hopkins, Long Gone Miles, JB Hutto and the Hawks, and Muddy Waters. Their styles were each so different that it required me to learn to adapt to different melodic and rhythmic changes.

RG: Any things you might share about some of the legendary harp players you’ve spent time with?

JF: Paul Butterfield was playing in California quite often then and I don’t think I missed too many shows. I was really impressed by his vigor, the band, and the raw edginess of how that Chicago thing was being translated by a new group of people; going from old school to new school. I didn’t play electric harp, so that was interesting to me.

I met Taj Mahal at the Ash Grove too. We had a lot common musical interests and shared similar harmonica influences in that we both primarily played from an acoustic perspective.

I haven’t mentioned Al Wilson. I spent quite a bit of time with Al talking about the instrument. He was another Ash Grove guy. Just a really special cat who had a really personal view of that musical genre (Blues). He was so in love with that and imbued with the talent to make it work. We played a lot of the same gigs together and saw a lot of eachother. I loved the way he used to tape off the reed to get the minor 3rd on draw 6 on On the Road Again. He’d put a little piece of tape on the base of the reed to tune it up. I think it was a note he wanted from the melody that wasn’t on the harp, so he figured out how to get it.

I tended to hang more with the country guys, and even the blues I got tended to come through the country guys. Sonny Terry was closer to my center. Somebody like Deford Bailey would be on my list. Taj Mahal was not too far from being a country player. Butterfield on the other hand was more of a Chicago player. Sonny’s thing was about rhythmic stuff; he taught me about breathing through the harp and how to keep playing without running out of breath. Butterfield was the new version of the Chicago players and he was quite sophisticated and knew how to work what he had well; his singing and harp playing were well matched, but stylistically my interests were in the acoustic players like Sonny Boy, early Little Walter, and some of Big Walter’s music.

RG: How has your multi-instrumentalist, songwriting, and touring background influenced your harmonica playing and your approach to the studio and sideman work?

JF: I think if you play another instrument, like guitar, and write songs, I think you’ll kind of know where you want the harmonica to play. It’s really easy to be your own producer because you know what you’d want for yourself is what you can give someone else. You know structure, chord progressions, how songs are put together and thus, how you might approach someone else’s song.

RG: Which of your harmonica recordings are you most proud of?

JF: Within our band, the work that I did on the Will the Circle Be Unbroken Vol. 1 with Vassar Clements comes to mind. It’s a lot of fiddle and harp playing harmony lines or playing off of each other in an unusual way. It just sort of happened that he would play something and I would play something that I felt fit; it was very natural and spontaneous. A lot of this came from my time spent jamming with Bluegrass players. Vassar was the perfect vehicle for me to play along with and that record set a high standard for me in a traditional Bluegrass sense. Now that I don’t have Vassar to play with anymore, it’s clear that we really had a great musical moment that was interesting and natural.

The Dan Fogelberg song Run for the Roses was one of the earlier studio dates where I was asked to play something specific. Usually they say “play some of that train sounding thing”, “fill in between the second and third verse”, or “leading into the chorus, we’d like a nice big five note”; this was not that and they had a particular melody they wanted played. There’s a very funny story there---Charlie McCoy saw Dan Fogelberg and said, “I just heard Run for the Roses. It’s really good! I don’t remember when we did that!” And Dan told Charlie, “That wasn’t you, that was Jimmie Fadden!” That was quite a compliment to me that Charlie thought it was him. I played on a couple of Linda Ronstadt tracks that were really nice; the first Jackson Browne album had a song called Child in These Hills where he lets me play the main rhythm figure on the outro; there’s a few little pieces here and there where I’ve been happy with my performance.

RG: How has a lot of your sideman work come about?

JF: They’re pretty much people I either know personally and socially; Jackson (Browne) was in the Dirt band for a period of time, so that was pretty obvious; Linda was part of our group that hung out together in Southern California. There are some that I don’t really know how they came about. Sometimes it was just a casual meeting where I gave someone my number and told them I’d love to do it. I played on a couple of Alabama tracks; we had done some shows with them and had the same producer. It’s funny, in Nashville, where I lived for twenty years, there’s a bit of pecking order; if you’re a road guy, you stay a road guy, and if you’re a studio guy, you stay a studio guy. I’d see people and ask them why they didn’t have me play on a particular record and they’d tell me they didn’t think I was around; out of sight, out of mind! It’s just as well, playing live is my favorite thing to do!

RG: Any general advice about recording?

JF: Listening is the most important part, then comes applying what you hear to what you play, and hopefully editing yourself as you go. As you play with people, it’s important to take as much as you can and add it to your library of knowledge. Harmonica is an instrument where less is more. If you can make people feel something, then you’ve succeeded. There are players out there who have an ability to play incredibly complicated music, but as a listener I need a break after listening to about twenty minutes of that approach. It’s difficult for a listener to absorb an intense level of play unless they’re a musician.

RG: What are some recordings that have inspired you?

JF: I don’t really have a library of favorite recordings. Everything I heard I just tried to internalize. I listened a lot more to how people played than what they played; the enthusiasm in Sonny Terry’s playing, Taj Mahal’s tongue blocking, what Sonny Boy did with those big hands, etc.

RG: Any advice on the technical aspect of recording harmonica?

JF: I think the one consideration in all the recording I’ve done is a large diaphragm microphone, like a Neumann U87 and U67 or the TLM series. There’s something about those mics that responds well to the timbral range of the reeds, from a quiet, smooth sound to a loud biting sound, and I think you can work a mic like that better. You can move in and out from the mic diaphragm and fade yourself in and out effectively, very much the way I do when playing live. I never just stand right in front of the mic; I usually move into the mic when I want it to be more full, and I’ll usually back away on a long, sustained part that I want to back out of the track.

RG: What are some of the areas of the harmonica you currently find intriguing and that keep you engaged with performing and the instrument?

JF: What catches my imagination is the likes of Howard Levy or Brendan Power and listening to how they’ve taken the instrument and applied it to the way they hear the world. While I don’t hear music in the same way, it’s fascinating to hear their palate of notes, Howard’s jazz, and Brendan’s Celtic melodies.

RG: Any closing thoughts?

JF: Well, I’m still having a lot of fun and am a really lucky guy! I still love every moment of it and even more so as I’ve gotten older and I don’t take things for granted. I truly appreciate my audience and I’m entirely impressed by all of the young players, the interest they show in the instrument, and the vitality they bring to the world of harmonica playing. It blows my imagination when I hear about these conferences and harmonica festivals! To all the harp players out there, keep harping on; you allow the audience to feel what you play and enjoin their emotion with yours and that’s one of the greatest feeling we can have! Keep it honest and keep it simple!